Reihan Salam and Matthew Klein don’t want to legislate for demographics, but they do want to tax incentivize for them. Here’s Salam’s solution:

Who should pay more? Nonparents who earn more than the median household income, just a shade above $51,000… We all benefit from the work of parents. Each new generation reinvigorates our society with its youthful vim and vigor. As my childless friends and I grow crankier and more decrepit, a steady stream of barely postpubescent brainiacs writes catchy tunes and invents breakthrough technologies that keep us entertained and make us more productive. The willingness of parents to bear and nurture children saves us from becoming an economically moribund nation of hateful curmudgeons.

Not everyone is ready to write a rejoinder to Rust Cohle-esque anti-natalism into the tax code. Matt Yglesias wrote in 2009 that a focus on the economic consequences of the birth rate is a vestigial agrarian impulse. His preferred policy is essentially fertility neutrality: “To deliberately constrain people from having large families would be abhorrent, but it’s not clear to me that we should be going out of our way to encourage them to do so”.

Choosing not to have a child has fairly straightforward economic benefits, beyond avoiding ten plus thousand dollars in medical costs. BuzzFeed’s Anna North says that there are economic benefits of birth control: “56% of women said contraception had allowed them to support themselves financially; 51% said it had helped them finish their education. And 50% said it had help them get or keep a job.” Part of America’s falling birth rate is the plummeting rate of teen pregnancy, which is an unalloyed good.

A very easy way to make more Americans is to let in more people into the country who want to be here. Overall US population growth was just 0.7% in 2007, so why not, Ezra Klein asked, pass immigration reform. “Immigration is essentially the importation of new workers. It’s akin to raising the birth rate, only easier, because most of the newcomers are old enough to work”.

Religious incentives can, in highly specific cases, work too. Georgia saw a 20% rise in births in 2008 after the head of the country’s Orthodox church promised to personally baptize any baby of parents with more than two kids. – Ben Walsh